Book Proposals

The Open Book Series™

MSP is proud to an­nounce the Open Book Series,
a new series of pro­ceed­ings and mono­graphs with a high qual­ity of con­tent.
Each volume can be read freely on­line, while prin­ted cop­ies are avail­able for pur­chase.

Geometry & Topology Monographs

The GTM series is in­ten­ded for re­search mono­graphs, ref­er­eed con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings, and sim­il­ar col­lec­tions. They are pub­lished at the Uni­versity of War­wick (UK) un­der the im­print
Geo­metry & To­po­logy Pub­lic­a­tions.
Each volume can be read freely on­line, while prin­ted cop­ies are avail­able for pur­chase.

R. Inanç Baykur, John Etnyre and Ursula Hamenstädt (editors)

GTM 19
(2015)
viii+413

There has been a long his­tory of rich and subtle con­nec­tions between low-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy, map­ping class groups and geo­met­ric group the­ory. From 1 to 5 Ju­ly 2013, the con­fer­ence “In­ter­ac­tions between low di­men­sion­al to­po­logy and map­ping class groups,” held at the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Math­em­at­ics in Bonn, high­lighted these di­verse con­nec­tions and fostered new and un­ex­pec­ted col­lab­or­a­tions between re­search­ers in these areas.

The pro­ceed­ings for this con­fer­ence aim to fur­ther draw at­ten­tion to the beau­ti­ful math­em­at­ics emer­ging from di­verse in­ter­ac­tions between these areas. The art­icles col­lec­ted in this volume, in ad­di­tion to gath­er­ing new res­ults, also con­tain ex­pos­i­tions and sur­veys of the latest de­vel­op­ments in vari­ous act­ive areas of re­search at the in­ter­face of map­ping class groups of sur­faces and the to­po­logy and geo­metry of 3- and 4-di­men­sion­al man­i­folds. Many open prob­lems and new dir­ec­tions for re­search are dis­cussed.

Lectures on Poisson geometry (Trieste, 2005)

Tudor Ratiu, Alan Weinstein and Nguyen Tien Zung (editors)

GTM 17
(2011)
xiv+503

Pois­son geo­metry is a rap­idly grow­ing sub­ject, with many in­ter­ac­tions and ap­plic­a­tions in areas of math­em­at­ics and phys­ics, such as clas­sic­al dif­fer­en­tial geo­metry, Lie the­ory, non­com­mut­at­ive geo­metry, in­teg­rable sys­tems, flu­id dy­nam­ics, quantum mech­an­ics, and quantum field the­ory. Re­cog­niz­ing the role played by Pois­son geo­metry and the sig­ni­fic­ant re­search it has gen­er­ated, the Ab­dus Salam In­ter­na­tion­al Centre for The­or­et­ic­al Phys­ics in Trieste, Italy, sponsored a 3-week sum­mer activ­ity on this sub­ject (Ju­ly 4–22 2005) in or­der to bring it to the at­ten­tion of sci­ent­ists and stu­dents from de­vel­op­ing coun­tries. There was an over­whelm­ing re­sponse to this pro­gram, which brought to­geth­er more than 150 par­ti­cipants from all over the world with var­ied back­grounds, from gradu­ate stu­dents to ex­perts.

The pro­gram con­sisted of a two-week in­tens­ive school com­pris­ing 10 minicourses, fol­lowed by a week-long in­ter­na­tion­al re­search con­fer­ence. The lec­tur­ers at the school were asked to turn their notes in­to sec­tions of a book that could serve as a quick in­tro­duc­tion to the cur­rent state of re­search in Pois­son geo­metry. We hope that the present volume will be use­ful to people who want to learn about Pois­son geo­metry and its ap­plic­a­tions.

Andrew Baker and Birgit Richter (editors)

GTM 16
(2009)
x+593

In the late twen­ti­eth cen­tury, stable ho­mo­topy the­ory ex­pan­ded rap­idly and be­came in­creas­ingly soph­ist­ic­ated in de­fin­ing ho­mo­top­ic­ally in­vari­ant al­geb­ra­ic ma­chinery as­so­ci­ated with mul­ti­plic­at­ive co­homo­logy the­or­ies and their in­tern­al op­er­a­tions. In­puts to these de­vel­op­ments have in­cluded es­tab­lished math­em­at­ic­al ideas from sub­jects such as al­geb­ra­ic geo­metry and num­ber the­ory. The work­shop “New To­po­lo­gic­al Con­texts for Galois The­ory and Al­geb­ra­ic Geo­metry” brought to­geth­er to­po­lo­gists in­volved in de­vel­op­ing or us­ing these new tech­niques and al­lowed for the in­ter­ac­tions with oth­er sub­ject areas by in­clud­ing non-to­po­lo­gist par­ti­cipants who would con­trib­ute to this.

Compactness and gluing theory for monopoles

Kim A. Frøyshov

GTM 15
(2008)
viii+198

This book is de­voted to the study of mod­uli spaces of Seiberg–Wit­ten mono­poles over spinc Rieman­ni­an 4-man­i­folds with long necks and/or tu­bu­lar ends. The ori­gin­al pur­pose of this work was to provide ana­lyt­ic­al found­a­tions for a cer­tain con­struc­tion of Flo­er ho­mo­logy of ra­tion­al ho­mo­logy 3-spheres; this is car­ried out in “Mono­pole Flo­er ho­mo­logy for ra­tion­al ho­mo­logy 3-spheres” [arX­iv 0809.4842]. However, along the way the pro­ject grew, and, ex­cept for some of the trans­vers­al­ity res­ults, most of the the­ory is de­veloped more gen­er­ally than is needed for that con­struc­tion. Flo­er ho­mo­logy it­self is hardly touched upon in this book, and, to com­pensate for that, I have in­cluded an­oth­er ap­plic­a­tion of the ana­lyt­ic­al ma­chinery, namely a proof of a
“gen­er­al­ized blow-up for­mula” which is an im­port­ant tool for com­put­ing Seiberg–Wit­ten in­vari­ants.

The book is di­vided in­to three parts.
Part 1 is al­most identic­al to my pa­per
“Mono­poles over 4-man­i­folds con­tain­ing long necks, I” [Geom. To­pol.9 (2005) 1–93]. The oth­er two parts con­sist of pre­vi­ously un­pub­lished ma­ter­i­al.
Part 2 is an ex­pos­it­ory ac­count of glu­ing the­ory in­clud­ing ori­ent­a­tions. The main nov­el­ties here may be the for­mu­la­tion of the glu­ing the­or­em, and the ap­proach to ori­ent­a­tions.
In Part 3 the ana­lyt­ic­al res­ults are brought to­geth­er to prove the gen­er­al­ized blow-up for­mula.

Groups, homotopy and configuration spaces (Tokyo, 2005)

GTM 13
(2008)
xii+546

This volume is the pro­ceed­ings of the con­fer­ence “Groups, Ho­mo­topy and Con­fig­ur­a­tion Spaces” held at the Uni­versity of Tokyo, Ju­ly 5–11, 2005, in hon­or of the 60th birth­day of Fred Co­hen. The em­phas­is of the con­fer­ence was on co­homo­logy of groups, clas­sic­al and mod­ern ho­mo­topy the­ory, geo­metry and to­po­logy of con­fig­ur­a­tion spaces and re­lated top­ics. However, the con­fer­ence was in­ten­ded to have a broad scope, with talks on a vari­ety of top­ics of cur­rent in­terests in to­po­logy. The or­gan­iz­ing com­mit­tee con­sisted of Norio Iwase, Toshi­take Kohno, Ran Levi, Dai Ta­maki and Jie Wu. The con­fer­ence was sup­por­ted by the COE pro­gram of the Gradu­ate School of Math­em­at­ic­al Sci­ences, The Uni­versity of Tokyo.

Workshop on Heegaard Splittings (Technion, 2005)

Cameron Gordon and Yo'av Moriah (editors)

GTM 12
(2007)
xiv+411

The no­tion of a Hee­gaard split­ting of a 3-man­i­fold is as old as 3-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy it­self; we may re­call, for ex­ample, that Poin­caré de­scribed his do­deca­hed­ral space by means of a Hee­gaard dia­gram. It also seems to be the case that one of the early mo­tiv­a­tions for the study of auto­morph­isms of sur­faces was the de­sire to un­der­stand 3-man­i­folds through their Hee­gaard split­tings. Nev­er­the­less, for many years know­ledge about Hee­gaard split­tings was lim­ited; the fol­low­ing is a more or less com­plete list of things that were known up to 1970: 3-man­i­folds are tri­an­gulable, and hence pos­sess Hee­gaard split­tings (Moise, 1952); any two Hee­gaard split­tings of a giv­en 3-man­i­fold be­come iso­top­ic afer some num­ber of sta­bil­iz­a­tions (Re­idemeister, Sing­er, 1933); S3 has a unique split­ting of any genus up to iso­topy (Wald­hausen, 1968); Hee­gaard genus is ad­dit­ive un­der con­nec­ted sum (Haken, 1968); the al­geb­ra­ic char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of Hee­gaard split­tings in terms of split­ting ho­mo­morph­isms (Stallings, 1966).

Start­ing in the 1980s, pro­gress in the sub­ject began to ac­cel­er­ate and it entered more and more in­to the main­stream of 3-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy, with de­vel­op­ments com­ing from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions. There are now enough gen­er­al res­ults and tech­niques es­tab­lished to jus­ti­fy speak­ing of the the­ory of Hee­gaard split­tings. A (cer­tainly in­com­plete) list of re­cent ad­vances in the sub­ject is the fol­low­ing: the clas­si­fic­a­tion of Hee­gaard split­tings of Seifert fiber spaces; the no­tion of strong ir­re­du­cib­il­ity; the in­tro­duc­tion of the curve com­plex in­to the study of Hee­gaard split­tings; the use of nor­mal and al­most nor­mal sur­faces; res­ults ob­tained us­ing Cerf the­ory (sweep-outs); the ap­plic­a­tion of the the­ory of min­im­al sur­faces; geo­met­ric to­po­lo­gic­al meth­ods, in­clud­ing the the­ory of lam­in­a­tions; res­ults re­lat­ing Hee­gaard split­tings to hy­per­bol­ic struc­tures, for in­stance hy­per­bol­ic volume; res­ults on the tun­nel num­ber of knots; the use of Hee­gaard split­tings to define Hee­gaard–Flo­er ho­mo­logy.

It was against this back­ground that the Tech­nion Work­shop on Hee­gaard Split­tings was held in the sum­mer of 2005. The goal was to gath­er people with a spe­cif­ic in­terest in Hee­gaard split­tings in one work­shop where the state of the art could be ex­posed and dis­cussed.

It was de­cided by the par­ti­cipants to pub­lish a pro­ceed­ings of the work­shop with the hope of mak­ing avail­able to in­ter­ested people a con­cen­trated source of in­form­a­tion about the cur­rent state of re­search on Hee­gaard split­tings. Some pa­pers were so­li­cited from non-par­ti­cipants whose in­terests are close to the field. We wish to thank all those who con­trib­uted to this volume for their ef­forts.

The volume also con­tains a list of prob­lems about Hee­gaard split­tings, con­trib­uted by some of the work­shop par­ti­cipants.

Proceedings of the School and Conference in Algebraic Topology (Hà Nôi, 2004)

John Hubbuck, Nguyen H. V. Hung and Lionel Schwartz (editors)

GTM 11
(2007)
vi+441

The Pro­ceed­ings of the in­ter­na­tion­al School and Con­fer­ence in Al­geb­ra­ic
To­po­logy, Hà Nội 2004, is a col­lec­tion of art­icles
in hon­our of Huỳnh Mùi, the founder of the Vi­et­nam school in
Al­geb­ra­ic To­po­logy.

Not long ago, Hà Nội, the cap­it­al city, was known as
the cent­ral icon of the long and ter­rible Vi­et­nam War. Nowadays, Hà Nội
is proud to be known as a young centre of math­em­at­ics.
The in­ter­na­tion­al School and Con­fer­ence in Al­geb­ra­ic To­po­logy, Hà Nội
2004, was the first not­able meet­ing on Al­geb­ra­ic
To­po­logy in Vi­et­nam with the par­ti­cip­a­tion of an im­press­ive num­ber of
both young and in­ter­na­tion­ally es­tab­lished Al­geb­ra­ic To­po­lo­gists.

The Hà Nội 2004 Pro­ceed­ings’ main top­ics are the
Steen­rod al­gebra, in­vari­ant the­ory, clas­si­fy­ing spaces, and group
co­homo­logy. It con­tains tran­scripts of some of the school courses and
the con­fer­ence talks as well as re­lated art­icles sub­mit­ted spe­cific­ally
for the Pro­ceed­ings. Most of the art­icles in the Pro­ceed­ings present
ori­gin­al re­search with proofs. Oth­ers are sur­vey art­icles writ­ten by
lead­ing ex­perts.

Proceedings of the Nishida Fest (Kinosaki, 2003)

GTM 10
(2007)
449

A ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al meet­ing on ho­mo­topy the­ory took place in Kino­saki,
Ja­pan, from Ju­ly 28–Au­gust 1 2003, fol­lowed on Au­gust 4–8 by an in­tense
satel­lite con­fer­ence at the Nagoya In­sti­tute of Tech­no­logy. This volume
con­tains the Pro­ceed­ings of those con­fer­ences. They, and this volume,
are ded­ic­ated to Pro­fess­or Gôrô Nishida on the oc­ca­sion of his 60th birth­day.

Nishida’s earli­est work grew out of the study of in­fin­ite loopspaces.
His first pa­per (in 1968, on what came even­tu­ally to be known as the
Nishida re­la­tions) ac­counts for in­ter­ac­tions between Steen­rod and Dyer–Lashof
(Kudo–Araki) op­er­a­tions. This was fol­lowed by early work with H. Toda
on the ex­ten­ded power con­struc­tion, which led in 1973 to his mile­stone
proof of the nil­po­tence of pos­it­ive-de­gree ele­ments in the stable ho­mo­topy
ring of spheres.

This res­ult, whose echoes con­tin­ue to re­ver­ber­ate today in work of Dev­in­atz,
Hop­kins, Smith, and oth­ers on the chro­mat­ic pic­ture, and in work on motives
in al­geb­ra­ic geo­metry, stood at the time as an isol­ated beacon of hope in
the (then very mys­ter­i­ous) world of stable ho­mo­topy the­ory. It, to­geth­er
with the Kahn–Priddy the­or­em, was one of the first signs that the sub­ject
pos­sesses deep glob­al prop­er­ties—that it held struc­tur­al secrets well
bey­ond its already for­mid­able com­pu­ta­tion­al as­pects. Nishida next turned
his at­ten­tion to a circle of ideas sur­round­ing the Segal con­jec­ture,
trans­fer ho­mo­morph­isms, and stable split­tings of clas­si­fy­ing spaces
of groups. The ideas in this series of pa­pers have by now grown in­to a
rich sub­field of ho­mo­topy the­ory, with im­port­ant con­tri­bu­tions by Ben­son,
Fesh­bach, Mar­tino, Mi­n­ami, Priddy, Webb, and many oth­ers; it con­tin­ues
today in (for ex­ample) the the­ory of p-com­pact groups. In re­cent years
much of his work has been con­cerned with vari­ous as­pects of el­lipt­ic
co­homo­logy. His deep in­sight from the early 90s, that work of Eichler
and Shimura on mod­u­lar forms, high­er S1-trans­fers, and the dif­feo­morph­ism
group of the two-tor­us are all in­tim­ately con­nec­ted, is still not ad­equately
un­der­stood; its ex­ploit­a­tion may de­pend on new geo­met­ric ideas from the
de­vel­op­ing the­ory of el­lipt­ic ob­jects.

Exotic homology manifolds (Oberwolfach, 2003)

Frank Quinn and Andrew Ranicki (editors)

GTM 9
(2006)
153

The Work­shop on Exot­ic Ho­mo­logy Man­i­folds took place at MFO
(Math­em­at­isches Forschungsin­sti­tut Ober­wolfach) in Ger­many
on June 29th – Ju­ly 5th, 2003.

Ho­mo­logy man­i­folds were de­veloped in the first half of the 20th cen­tury
to give a pre­cise set­ting for Poin­caré’s ideas on du­al­ity. Ma­jor res­ults
in the second half of the cen­tury came from two dif­fer­ent areas. Meth­ods
from the point-set tra­di­tion were used to study ho­mo­logy man­i­folds
ob­tained by di­vid­ing genu­ine man­i­folds by fam­il­ies of con­tract­ible
sub­sets. Exot­ic ho­mo­logy man­i­folds are ones that can­not be
ob­tained in this way, and these have been in­vest­ig­ated us­ing al­geb­ra­ic
and geo­met­ric meth­ods. The Mini-Work­shop brought to­geth­er ex­perts from
both point-set and al­geb­ra­ic areas, along with new PhDs and ex­perts
in re­lated areas. This was the first time this was done in a meet­ing
fo­cused only on ho­mo­logy man­i­folds. The 17 par­ti­cipants had 14 form­al
lec­tures and a prob­lem ses­sion. There was a par­tic­u­lar fo­cus on the
proof, 10 years ago, of the ex­ist­ence of exot­ic ho­mo­logy man­i­folds.
This gave ex­perts in each area an the op­por­tun­ity to learn more about
de­tails com­ing from the oth­er area. There had also been con­cerns about
the cor­rect­ness of one of the lem­mas, and this was dis­cussed in de­tail.
One of the high points of the con­fer­ence was the dis­cov­ery of a short
and beau­ti­ful new proof of this lemma. Ex­tens­ive dis­cus­sions of ex­amples
and prob­lems have un­doubtedly helped pre­pare for fu­ture pro­gress in the
field.

These pro­ceed­ings for the meet­ing in­clude an art­icle on the his­tory of
the sub­ject and a prob­lem list.

There was also a won­der­ful in­ter­ac­tion with the Mini-Work­shop Henri
Poin­caré and to­po­logy, which was held in the same week. There was a
joint dis­cus­sion on the early his­tory of man­i­folds, and both groups
offered even­ing lec­tures on top­ics of in­terest to the oth­er. Sev­er­al
of the day­time his­tory lec­tures also drew large num­bers of ho­mo­logy
man­i­fold par­ti­cipants.

The interaction of finite-type and Gromov–Witten invariants (Banff, 2003)

David Auckly and Jim Bryan (editors)

GTM 8
(2006)
456

In the sum­mer of 2001, we (Dave and Jim) were at the Gökova con­fer­ence in Tur­key talk­ing about BIRS, the new math­em­at­ics in­sti­tute that was go­ing to open in Ban­ff, Canada, in 2003. Al­though 2003 seemed like a long way off at the time, we wanted to pro­pose a work­shop. For­tu­it­ously, Jim had re­cently heard about some ex­cit­ing work in phys­ics by Go­pak­u­mar, Vafa and oth­ers that had found some very ex­pli­cit con­nec­tions between to­po­lo­gic­al string the­ory and Chern–Si­mons gauge the­ory—the very same phys­ic­al the­or­ies that led to the math­em­at­ic­al the­or­ies of Gro­mov–Wit­ten in­vari­ants and fi­nite type in­vari­ants. Al­though these ideas had not yet taken hold in the math com­munity, it seemed likely that with­in a few years they would be timely and war­rant a work­shop.

In­deed, by 2003, the top­ic was very timely. Phys­i­cists Aganagic, Klemm, Marino, and Vafa had de­veloped the “to­po­lo­gic­al ver­tex”, a gad­get which (con­jec­tur­ally) com­puted Gro­mov–Wit­ten of tor­ic Calabi–Yau threefolds in terms of cer­tain in­vari­ants of fi­nite type: Chern–Si­mons in­vari­ants. Math­em­aticians Li, Liu, Liu, and Zhou had be­gun to de­vel­op a math­em­at­ic­al frame­work for the to­po­lo­gic­al ver­tex. Garoufal­id­is and Le had just proven the LMOV con­jec­ture. This con­jec­ture en­coded in­teg­ral­ity prop­er­ties of the HOM­FLY(PT) poly­no­mi­al that must hold if the con­jec­tur­al large-N du­al­ity was in­deed true. In ad­di­tion new con­jec­tures re­lat­ing large N du­al­ity with Khovan­ov ho­mo­logy were form­ing.

Proceedings of the Casson Fest (Arkansas and Texas, 2003)

Cameron Gordon and Yoav Rieck (editors)

GTM 7
(2004)
xii+547

This volume con­tains pa­pers on a wide range of top­ics in low-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy. It arose out of two events that were held in 2003. The first was the 28th Uni­versity of Arkan­sas Spring Lec­ture Series in the Math­em­at­ic­al Sci­ences, which took place April 10–12, 2003. These an­nu­al con­fer­ences fo­cus on a spe­cif­ic top­ic of cur­rent in­terest in math­em­at­ics, and fea­ture a prin­cip­al lec­turer who gives a series of five lec­tures and se­lects ad­di­tion­al in­vited speak­ers. In 2003 the prin­cip­al lec­turer was An­drew Cas­son, and the title of his lec­ture series was "The An­drews-Curtis and the Poin­care Con­jec­tures". The in­vited speak­ers were Steph­en Bi­gelow, Mar­tin Brid­son, Danny Calegari, Nath­an Dun­field, Camer­on Gor­don, Alan Re­id, Mar­tin Schar­le­mann, Zlil Sela, and Peter Shalen. A spe­cial pub­lic lec­ture was giv­en by Jeff Weeks. There were also sev­er­al con­trib­uted talks. The or­gan­izers were Chaim Good­man-Strauss and Yo'av Rieck. The con­fer­ence was sup­por­ted by NSF Grant DMS-0245047 and by the De­part­ment of Math­em­at­ic­al Sci­ences, Ful­bright Col­lege of Arts and Sci­ences and Gradu­ate School of the Uni­versity of Arkan­sas.

The second event was the Con­fer­ence on the To­po­logy of Man­i­folds of Di­men­sions 3 and 4, held at the Uni­versity of Texas at Aus­tin, May 19–21, 2003, in hon­or of the 60th birth­day of An­drew Cas­son. In­vited lec­tures were giv­en by Danny Calegari, Bob Ed­wards, Mike Freed­man, Dave Gabai, Rob Kirby, Greg Ku­per­berg, Dar­ren Long, Peter Oz­s­vath, An­drew Ran­icki, Ron Stern, Peter Teich­ner, Kev­in Walk­er, and Terry Wall. The or­gan­iz­ing com­mit­tee con­sisted of Camer­on Gor­don, Bob Gom­pf, John Luecke and Alan Re­id. The con­fer­ence was sup­por­ted by NSF Grant DMS-0229035 and by the De­part­ment of Math­em­at­ics of the Uni­versity of Texas at Aus­tin.

Four-manifolds, geometries and knots

Jonathan Hillman

GTM 5
(2002)
382

The goal of this book is to char­ac­ter­ize al­geb­ra­ic­ally the closed 4-man­i­folds that fibre non­trivi­ally or ad­mit geo­met­ries in the sense of Thur­ston, or which are ob­tained by sur­gery on 2-knots, and to provide a ref­er­ence for the to­po­logy of such man­i­folds and knots. The first chapter is purely al­geb­ra­ic. The rest of the book may be di­vided in­to three parts: gen­er­al res­ults on ho­mo­topy and sur­gery (Chapters 2–6), geo­met­ries and geo­met­ric de­com­pos­i­tions (Chapters 7–13), and 2-knots (Chapters 14–18). In many cases the Euler char­ac­ter­ist­ic, fun­da­ment­al group and Stiefel–Whit­ney classes to­geth­er form a com­plete sys­tem of in­vari­ants for the ho­mo­topy type of such man­i­folds, and the pos­sible val­ues of the in­vari­ants can be de­scribed ex­pli­citly. The strongest res­ults are char­ac­ter­iz­a­tions of man­i­folds which fibre ho­mo­top­ic­ally over S1 or an as­pher­ic­al sur­face (up to ho­mo­topy equi­val­ence) and in­fra­solv­man­i­folds (up to homeo­morph­ism). As a con­sequence 2-knots whose groups are poly–Z are de­term­ined up to Gluck re­con­struc­tion and change of ori­ent­a­tions by their groups alone.

This book arose out of two earli­er books: 2-Knots and their Groups and The Al­geb­ra­ic Char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of Geo­met­ric 4-Man­i­folds, pub­lished by Cam­bridge Uni­versity Press for the Aus­trali­an Math­em­at­ic­al So­ci­ety and for the Lon­don Math­em­at­ic­al So­ci­ety, re­spect­ively. About a quarter of the present text has been taken from these books, and I thank Cam­bridge Uni­versity Press for their per­mis­sion to use this ma­ter­i­al. The ar­gu­ments have been im­proved and the res­ults strengthened, not­ably in us­ing Bowditch’s ho­mo­lo­gic­al cri­terion for vir­tu­al sur­face groups to stream­line the res­ults on sur­face bundles, us­ing L2 meth­ods in­stead of loc­al­iz­a­tion, com­plet­ing the char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of map­ping tori, re­lax­ing the hy­po­theses on tor­sion or on abeli­an nor­mal sub­groups in the fun­da­ment­al group and in de­riv­ing the res­ults on 2–knot groups from the work on 4–man­i­folds. The main tools used are co­homo­logy of groups, equivari­ant Poin­care du­al­ity and (to a less­er ex­tent) L2–co­homo­logy, 3–man­i­fold the­ory and sur­gery.

Invariants of knots and 3-manifolds (Kyoto, 2001)

GTM 4
(2002)
572

The work­shop and sem­inars on “In­vari­ants of Knots and 3-Man­i­folds” took place at the Re­search In­sti­tute for Math­em­at­ic­al Sci­ences (RIMS), Kyoto Uni­versity, in Septem­ber 2001. The work­shop was held over the peri­od Septem­ber 17–21. Sem­inars were held on the Tues­days, Wed­nes­days and Thursdays of the oth­er weeks of Septem­ber, in­clud­ing “Gous­sarov day” on Septem­ber 25.

Since the in­ter­ac­tion between geo­metry and math­em­at­ic­al phys­ics in the 1980s, many in­vari­ants of knots and 3-man­i­folds have been dis­covered and stud­ied: poly­no­mi­al in­vari­ants such as the Jones poly­no­mi­al, Vassiliev in­vari­ants, the Kont­sevich in­vari­ant of knots, quantum and per­turb­at­ive in­vari­ants, the LMO in­vari­ant and fi­nite type in­vari­ants of 3-man­i­folds. The dis­cov­ery and ana­lys­is of the enorm­ous num­ber of these in­vari­ants yiel­ded a new area: the study of in­vari­ants of knots and 3-man­i­folds (from an­oth­er view­point, the study of the sets of knots and 3-man­i­folds). There are also de­vel­op­ing top­ics re­lated to oth­er areas such as hy­per­bol­ic geo­metry via the volume con­jec­ture and the the­ory of op­er­at­or al­geb­ras via in­vari­ants arising from 6j-sym­bols. On the oth­er hand, re­cent works have al­most com­pleted the to­po­lo­gic­al re­con­struc­tion of the in­vari­ants de­rived from the Chern-Si­mons field the­ory.

An aim of the work­shop and sem­inars was to dis­cuss fu­ture dir­ec­tions for this area. To dis­cuss these mat­ters fully, we planned one month of activ­it­ies, re­l­at­ively longer than usu­al. Fur­ther, to en­cour­age dis­cus­sions among the par­ti­cipants, we ar­ranged a short prob­lem ses­sion after each talk, and re­ques­ted the speak­er to give his/her open prob­lems there. Many in­ter­est­ing prob­lems were presen­ted in these prob­lem ses­sions and, based on them, we had valu­able dis­cus­sions in and between sem­inars and the work­shop. Open prob­lems dis­cussed there were ed­ited and formed in­to a prob­lem list, which, I hope, will cla­ri­fy the present fron­ti­er of this area and as­sist read­ers when con­sid­er­ing fu­ture dir­ec­tions.

Invitation to higher local fields (Münster, 1999)

Ivan Fesenko and Masato Kurihara (editors)

GTM 3
(2000)
304

This mono­graph is the res­ult of the con­fer­ence on high­er loc­al fields held in Mün­ster, Au­gust 29 to Septem­ber 5, 1999. The aim is to provide an in­tro­duc­tion to high­er loc­al fields (more gen­er­ally com­plete dis­crete valu­ation fields with ar­bit­rary residue field) and render the main ideas of this the­ory (Part I), as well as to dis­cuss sev­er­al ap­plic­a­tions and con­nec­tions to oth­er areas (Part II). The volume grew as an ex­ten­ded ver­sion of talks giv­en at the con­fer­ence. The two parts are sep­ar­ated by a pa­per of K. Kato, an IHES pre­print from 1980 which has nev­er been pub­lished.

An n-di­men­sion­al loc­al field is a com­plete dis­crete valu­ation field whose residue field is an (n–1)-di­men­sion­al loc­al field; 0-di­men­sion­al loc­al fields are just per­fect (e.g., fi­nite) fields of pos­it­ive char­ac­ter­ist­ic. Giv­en an arith­met­ic scheme, there is a high­er loc­al field as­so­ci­ated to a flag of sub­s­chemes on it. One of cent­ral res­ults on high­er loc­al fields, class field the­ory, de­scribes abeli­an ex­ten­sions of an n-di­men­sion­al loc­al field via (all in the case of fi­nite 0-di­men­sion­al residue field; some in the case of in­fin­ite 0-di­men­sion­al residue field) closed sub­groups of the n-th Mil­nor K-group of F.

We hope that the volume will be a use­ful in­tro­duc­tion and guide to the sub­ject. The con­tri­bu­tions to this volume were re­ceived over the peri­od Novem­ber 1999 to Au­gust 2000 and the elec­tron­ic pub­lic­a­tion date is 10 Decem­ber 2000.

Proceedings of the Kirbyfest (Berkeley, 1998)

Joel Hass and Martin Scharlemann (editors)

GTM 2
(1999)
xvi+581

Rob Kirby’s re­search spans a broad spec­trum of top­ics, all with this strong visu­al fla­vor: to­po­lo­gic­al man­i­folds of high di­men­sion; the struc­ture of smooth 4-man­i­folds and their re­la­tion­ship to com­plex sur­faces; and the emer­ging new in­vari­ants for both 3- and 4-di­men­sion­al man­i­folds. In both di­men­sions three and four, the “Kirby Cal­cu­lus” has be­come a stand­ard ana­lyt­ic­al tool. He has helped to or­gan­ize and to de­vel­op prob­lem lists which have be­come stand­ard ref­er­ence points for pro­gress in geo­met­ric to­po­logy.

The Kirby­fest, held at the Math­em­at­ic­al Sci­ences Re­search In­sti­tute on 22–26 June 1998, at­trac­ted over 100 math­em­aticians from around the globe. Many of the par­ti­cipants were col­lab­or­at­ors, or former stu­dents; oth­ers were just fans of Kirby and his work. There were 27 plen­ary talks, cov­er­ing a wide vari­ety of to­po­lo­gic­ally re­lated sub­jects, in­clud­ing sev­er­al his­tor­ic­al sur­veys. Fields Medal­ists gave five of the talks. Sev­en present­a­tions were spe­cific­ally or­gan­ized to be eas­ily ac­cess­ible to gradu­ate stu­dents.

We hope these pro­ceed­ings con­vey some of the math­em­at­ic­al ex­cite­ment of the Kirby­fest week, and we are honored to ded­ic­ate it to Rob.